What I'm Reading
The books and articles I finished in May.
Greetings, booklings! I’m writing this as I sit shotgun on the highway in bumper-to-bumper Memorial Day weekend traffic. Not to brag, but I just ate a Chipotle salad in a moving car trapped with a farting French Bulldog whilst figuring out a finicky hotspot. I contain multitudes, etc.
Likely none of you noticed, but I didn’t send out a newsletter last week. I’ve decided that, because I am not three ChatGPT bots hiding in the body of an extremely pale and anxious woman, I can’t go HAM every week. (That is, not until I teach the aforementioned flatulent Frenchie how to type sans opposable thumbs. Then: world domination.) So, therefore, we’re gonna do three newsletters a month: A Pageturners Q&A with readers, a monthly round-up of what I’ve read, and a super-secret super-fun third installment that I’ll launch next month.
Between writing and reading and spending far too many hours wondering why my neighbor has been blasting the Mulan soundtrack on repeat, the rest of my free time has been consumed by the newest season of Selling Sunset. Hot damn, do I love those unhinged ladies. Where else can I watch someone like Chelsea sit in a bajillion dollar house wearing business attire that consists of tiny latex fingerless gloves? Truly amazing TV! This tweet sums it all up.
But enough about our favorite messy real estate agents. Let’s talk about what I’ve read this month:
I finished Kevin Wilson’s newest novel, Now Is Not the Time to Panic, which came out at the end of last year. I’m a huge Kevin Wilson fan—Nothing to See Here and The Family Fang remain some of my all-time favorite books. I didn’t love NISTTP as much as those two, but it was still all the Kevin Wilson things I’ve come to know and love: smart, funny, weird, and a little preposterous, sprinkled with observations that perfectly articulate life moments I’ve never really been able to put into words myself. Basically, it centers on two kids in a small Southern town in the ‘90s who inadvertently start a Satanic Panic-like scare that takes on a life of its own and becomes an international phenomenon. It’s a really good examination of virality—of course, the book takes place pre-internet, but it’s still an interesting reflection on how things can randomly spiral into the zeitgeist. Plus, I loved the descriptions of the setting, a small Tennessee outpost called Coalfield. As someone who grew up in a sleepy Southern town where usually the biggest piece of news was that we were getting a Buffalo Wild Wings, it really hit home (lolz).
I also read Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor, which I mentioned in my last monthly round-up. Waawaaweewa, was this one was a beast! It’s 560 pages. I can normally do a book a week, but this took me over two weeks to read. It takes place in New Delhi in the early 2000s and is broken into three parts—one follows the servant to the heir-slash-nepo baby of a very powerful family with shady business dealings, the second follows said nepo-baby, and the last follows a journalist who becomes entangled with our nepo baby. It read more like a thriller-crime novel to me, which I wasn’t totally expecting—it was very cinematic and plotty, and the imagery and descriptions of the Indian landscape were wonderful. But I will say, it could have used a good trimming—maybe at least 150 pages shorter. Overall, I enjoyed it, but it might be better to listen to it on a long car trip while sped up to 1.5x or something.
Another one on the list: Excavations by Kate Meyers, which is her debut novel. I interviewed Kate a few years ago for an article, and she graciously sent me an advanced copy of her novel. It centers on four very different women working on an archeological dig in Greece. When they find out that their mentor and the leader of the dig may be self-servingly hiding some crucial information that would change the narrative around their focus—ancient Greek sports, the women have to band together and overcome their differences to bring him down. Kate’s a great, voicey writer—think the wry observations of Curtis Sittenfeld with some of the kookiness of Kevin Wilson—and I laughed out loud several times while reading. It also has beautiful descriptions of the Greek landscape that would make this the perfect, intelligent-but-fun beach read. It comes out July 4, so you’ll need to pre-order if you want to read it. (Btw, pre-orders are mega important for authors: It generates buzz and can lead to retailers ordering more books, plus they count for your first week of sales—v crucial if you wanna hit any best-seller lists.)
I also finished Katherine Heiny’s Games and Rituals. Heiny wrote one of my fave books of 2021, Early Morning Riser, and this is her second book of short stories. (Her first, Single, Carefree, Mellow, is also v good.) I always forget about short stories! It’s kind of lovely to break up a long period of reading novels with a short story collection—you can just pop a few of those bad boys before bed. Many of Heiny’s stories center on the messy, complicated sides of relationships—a woman who suspects her acting-lesson-taking husband is cheating on her, another avoiding a clingy ex-husband—but she doesn’t dwell in the mess or the complicated in a heavy, grim way. Instead, Heiny excels in finding the humor and the delightfully weird in life’s uncomfy moments. She’s very funny, but not in an obvious or gimmicky way; each of her jokes sits like a small, tucked-away egg on the page, waiting for you to find it. Definitely check this one out.
And, okay, there’s aren’t books, but I also read two articles this month that I felt like I had to share. The first one is a Wall Street Journal article about this bougie neighborhood near Disney World where wealthy people shell out millions of dollars just to live near the park in Mouseketeer mansions. I will literally consume any form of content about Disney adults—I’m convinced they’re one of the more fascinating subgenres of human (if anyone knows a good book about this…HMU). I mean, a $19 million house with a Frozen-themed guest bedroom? Fuck. Me. UP! Sold. I’m automatically reading about that.
Also, everyone’s been buzzing about this New York Magazine package where they asked people to describe their dream lives and then actually calculated how much it would cost to attain them. I mean, don’t get me wrong—it was incredibly depressing, but I’ve made a somewhat tenuous peace with the fact that I will likely have to subsist on frozen Trader Joe’s cauliflower gnocchi for the rest of my life. But I’m nothing if not a gigantic, unapologetic voyeur, and I looooove reading about how much people spend for things and how tHe oTheR hALf lives. Great forum in which to do that, ten out of ten—think Refinery 29’s Money Diaries meets Gossip Girl.
And that is, as they say, all for now. Happy reading!
<3333333 Mimi